Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, seems like a refined and intelligent man. Speaking in public, he has an easy manner, a winsome smirk, and a pleasant drawl. Even though Senator Susan Collins opposed his nomination to lead the agency, the Republican senator made sure to note that he is bright and enjoyable, and that she might support him elsewhere in government.

He seems reasonable and genteel—all you’d want in southern lawyer.

Yet on Thursday, Pruitt let slip an opinion that was ugly, and false, and ugly in its falsehood. Carbon dioxide, he said, is not a “primary contributor” to global warming. In his opinion, the topic requires more study and debate.

With this comment, Pruitt finally confirms what many had long suspected: that he broadly rejects the mainstream scientific consensus around climate change. As I wrote Thursday, decades of research have found that carbon dioxide is a primary driver of modern-day global warming. Pruitt’s comment is ugly because he is discarding all the work of discovery that got us there—all those decades of careful observation, onerous computation, and hard-won consensus—without providing an equivalent body of evidence. He is embracing the concept of “study and debate” as a stall, refusing to cede to what actual study and debate have found. It flies in the face of discovery, of curiosity, and of fact.

The comment made headlines aroundthecountry and aroundtheworld. Here was the new national head of the environmental protection, dissembling on the critical environmental issue of our time.

But compared to the other environmental news that has lately come out of the Trump administration, Pruitt’s comments are of surprisingly little immediate importance. That’s because, over the past three weeks, the White House and its new political appointees have begun to roll out a comprehensive environmental and energy policy. It is broad, creative, and industry-backed. To those who accept the mainstream consensus on climate change, there can only be one conclusion: The Trump administration has begun a sustained assault on Earth’s climate.

This war will start in earnest on Tuesday, when early reports from E&E News indicate that President Trump will sign an executive order repealing the Clean Power Plan, the landmark regulation issued by the Obama administration that restricted greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. These same reports suggest that Trump will not direct the EPA to formulate a replacement plan.

This will be legally tricky, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA must regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. The agency itself formally ruled that greenhouse gases were dangerous two years later. Most experts have previously said that—due to these two precedents—Trump would have to put forward some kind of weak greenhouse-gas plan.

Scott Pruitt greets EPA employees on one of his first days as the agency’s administrator last month. (Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

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The New York Times has also reported that Pruitt may decline to issue California’s special waiver to address air pollution. I wrote last week about why this is such a big deal: Since the early 1970s, the federal government has allowed California special privileges to impose its own strict air-pollution rules. Other states with a history of air-quality problems—including Georgia, North Carolina, and the entire northeast—are then allowed to adopt these rules wholesale. Pruitt may try to knee-cap the the state’s rules that restrict greenhouse gases—cutting down California’s sweeping climate policy.

Repealing either of these policies—the Clean Power Plan or the CAFE standards—could have huge implications for the speed and intensity of climate change. The government estimates that the Clean Power Plan will prevent 870 million tons of carbon emissions, bringing power-sector emissions 30 percent below 2005 levels. It says that CAFE, the tailpipe standards, will save 1 billion tons.

And there’s a second cost to repealing these types of rules. When the EPA makes power plants abide by new pollution rules, utilities band together to invest in new and cheaper emissions-capturing technology. Often, this investment creates innovation and economies of scale, which make the pollution rules even cheaper to follow. When regulation gets rolled back, that innovation gets put off further into the future.

An Atlas rocket carrying NOAA’s GOES-R satellite lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, last year. Under Trump’s initial budget, the NOAA budget for satellites would be cut by more than $500 million, or 22 percent, in 2018. (Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

That’s the legal and regulatory front. Another battle is unfolding in the Trump administration’s proposed budget, which cuts funding both to research into climate change and into the government’s ability to do anything about it.

In these cuts, the administration is responding to a second problem: It wants to find $54 billion to pour into the Department of Defense, but it doesn’t want to raise taxes or increase the deficit. So it must find $54 billion in discretionary funding across the government to carve out and send the Pentagon’s way.

It starts with the EPA, which has a budget of $8.1 billion. The Trump administration has floated cutting the agency’s budget by 25 percent, essentially returning it to Carter administration funding levels.

As part of these cuts, 20 percent of the agency’s staff would be laid off. The EPA always runs lean, but Trump’s proposed cuts would slice into the bone: Thanks to years of sequestration funding, the agency’s staff is already as small today as it has been since 1989.

Many popular programs would disappear with these employees. They include:

The EPA’s EnergyStar program, a voluntary program that promotes energy-saving ovens, water heaters, and refrigerators;

The EPA’s Global Change Research program, which releases comprehensive reports on climate change in the United States;

and the entire, $50-million program that reduced air-pollution from diesel engines.

Many state grant programs would also take a major cut. In these programs, the EPA redistributes taxpayer money directly to the states, so they can deal with their environmental problems locally. Under Trump’s plan, state grants to improve air quality will take a 30-percent hit. Water-pollution state grants fall by 30 percent. And the local Chesapeake Bay and Great Lakes cleanup programs would be cut by 93 percent hit and 97 percent, respectively.

Then the White House turns to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides free weather forecasts and climate research to people and businesses across the country. According to The Washington Post, NOAA could see its budget cut by 17 percent, or $990 million.

Where would these cuts come from? NOAA’s research arm—which studies climate-related extreme events like hurricanes, late frosts, and heat waves—is slated for a 24 percent cut. Sea Grant, a $73-million program that monitors the health of U.S. coastlines and oceans, would be completely eliminated.

Meanwhile, the NOAA satellite program would see its budget cut by 22 percent, or $513 million. This is a particularly head-scratching reduction: The vast majority of data in the National Weather Service’s forecasts comes from NOAA satellites. At a time when American meteorology has fallen behind its European counterpart, why is the U.S. government cutting NOAA’s budget?

Taking EPA and NOAA together, the strategy is even stranger. If Scott Pruitt thinks global warming deserves more study, why is he cutting the exact parts of the federal government outfitted to research it? And why are Republicans in Congress thinking about cutting climate research from the National Science Foundation at the same time?

But look on the bright side—at least Americans are strengthening the Department of Defense with all of these millions. According to National Geographic, the EPA cuts will allow the Pentagon to pay for 30 hours of 2016-level operations. The NOAA cuts will pay for 15 hours of national defense.

Indigenous leaders protest the Dakota Access pipeline and other U.S. actions in front of Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Friday, March 10. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)

Still other parts of the government could face cuts. Experts expect that the Department of Energy will see $3 million lopped off its budget—cuts that are likely to come from renewable-energy research programs—but there’s been no specific reports on what’s affected so far. The Department of the Interior, which houses the U.S. Geological Survey, faces a $1.3-billion cut.

Meanwhile, members of the Trump administration have sent all sorts of little signs that their goal is to undermine climate science and intensify climate change. Scott Pruitt has filled the political leadership of the EPA with men who reject mainstream climate science. The White House has removed every legal obstacle to the swift completion of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. And last week, the White House released a press statement that copy-and-pasted a paragraph from an Exxon Mobil press release.

Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign, he’s sent mixed signals about the environment. He’s repeated, time and time again, that he loves clean water and clean air. Yet he’s also sworn that “we are going to get rid of [the EPA] in almost every form.” The EPA is the part of the federal government legally charged with protecting clean air and clean water.

With so much talk, and so much of it unclear, it’s best to look to policies instead—and on that front, there can be little doubt. The majority of Americans who are concerned about global warming should hold few illusions about what this administration is doing. On every front it can think of, with great speed and expertise and efficiency, it seeks to increase the amount of carbon-dioxide emissions and remove the legal restrictions on them. The Trump administration has declared a war on the climate.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”